Suchergebnisse

We introduce publicly funded education in R&D-based economic growth theory. The framework allows us to i) incorporate a realistic process of human capital accumulation for industrialized countries, ii) reconcile R&D-based growth theory with the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic prosperity and population growth, iii) revise the policy invariance result of semi-endogenous growth frameworks, and iv) show that the transitional effects of an education reform tend to be qualitatively different from its long-run impact.

We assess the long‐run growth effects of rising longevity and increasing the retirement age when growth is driven by purposeful research and development. In contrast to economies in which growth depends on learning‐by‐doing spillovers, raising the retirement age fosters economic growth. How economic growth changes in response to rising life expectancy depends on the retirement response. Employing numerical analysis, we find that the requirement for experiencing a growth stimulus from rising longevity is fulfilled by the USA, nearly met by the average OECD economy, but missed by the European Union and by Japan.

In the second half of the 20th century, most industrialized countries experienced declining fertility, rising life expectancy and a slowdown of population growth. Standard models of R&D‐based growth predict that a decline in population growth reduces economic growth. We argue that this implication hinges on the assumption of infinitely lived individuals. The semi‐endogenous growth model with overlapping generations that we propose implies a negative relationship between population growth and economic growth during a substantial part of the transitional dynamics if the decline in population growth is accompanied by an increase in life expectancy as observed in industrialized countries.

We analyze the short- and long-run effects of public education on economic growth and welfare. In so doing, we extend an R&D-based economic growth model by including a governmental sector that levies labor income taxes and uses the proceeds to finance teachers. An increase in the tax rate reduces consumption possibilities (and thereby individual utility), and the number of workers available for final goods production and research. At the same time, however, it increases the educational resources available per pupil. Consequently, economic growth slows down immediately after an increase in educational investments but it speeds up during the transition toward the long-run balanced growth path. Altogether, this implies a dynamic tradeoff in the sense that current cohorts loose due to educational reform, whereas future cohorts gain. We show that there exists an interior welfare-maximizing level of the provision of public education for each time horizon and show that it is higher than the levels we typically observe in industrialized countries. Since the transitional effects of an education reform on growth and welfare can be negative, our framework has the potential to explain resistance against long-run welfare improving education reforms.